The Free Market Debate (sic)

I am sure you have heard of this debate before, so I won’t be explaining just what it is. But I do have a question: what in your opinion is the biggest roadblock to having free markets? I am going to step out on a ledge and claim that you immediately thought of government intervention. It is the intervention of governments into free markets that messes them up and prevents them from doing what they do so well.

Am I right?

If I am, I think you now have proof of the manipulation of a public debate.

Think back to any financial crash you want. All the way back to 1929. Maybe the Savings and Loan Debacle. Or the Great Recession of 2008. Or the several times the Stock Market went haywire and we had a mini-crisis lasting just a few days. Were any of those caused by government oversight or government intervention? Any? Hmm, that’s interesting. If government intervention doesn’t cause financial panics or crashes, then what does? Let’s see, in 1929 it was runaway speculation by people playing the market to make easy money. In 2008, a major cause was the selling of bogus “financial instruments,” bundling lousy mortgages together and calling them Triple-A investments. Also, lenders were scheduling iffy housing loans based upon those faulty financial instruments.  There was an element of governmental controls during the S&L crisis as those regulations put many S&Ls into a box.

But, by and large, most of the financial crises have occurred because of market manipulation by market participants, not by government intervention.

For example, it was not long ago that corporations were not allowed to buy their own stock. It was thought that that would lead to stock price manipulation. But in the Clinton administration the business sector offered “campaign donations” to one and all if they would accept the reforms they thought were needed. One of those was to allow corporations to buy their own stock. At the same time regulations were passed to encourage corporations to pay their executives in stock options, rather than cash, to “give them a stake in the company.” You will have noticed that the majority of American corporations took their Trump administration tax cuts and used then to . . . create jobs, modernize their infrastructure, develop new products . . . uh, no, just kidding; they bought stock with the money, often their own stock. By executives deciding to buy their own stock, they drove up the price of their own stock, which made their shareholders happy, and made their salary payment in stock more remunerative for themselves. Do the right thing for their employees and society at large? Not on the agenda.

The “free market debate” isn’t a debate, it is a false dichotomy. The people promoting that this as an actual debate want there to be just two sides: one where the government messes things up, which it rarely does and one in which free markets, without any manipulation work like miracles. Somehow they always seem to leave out the markets as they really are: markets manipulated up the yin-yang by participants in the markets themselves.

Oh, and the days in which government dreamt up regulations on its own are long past. All new regulations are proposed by the industries being regulated themselves and is it any wonder those regulations seem to favor certain things?

Socialism Bad, Capitalism Good

I am not going to state anything novel here but will reinforce things already said. Currently there is an aspect of our political discourse that is summed up by the title of this post. It is, of course, false. What the “defenders of capitalism” are arguing for is the status quo in which we have a quasi-capitalist system, but one that protects the rich and screws the poor.

Think back on the Great Recession of 2008. If you are a pure capitalist, then a great many financiers, bankers, investors, and brokers should have lost all their money (everything but the bare minimums allowed in bankruptcy proceedings). Through greed they backed the wrong horses.

But the word “bailout” then comes to mind. To coin a phrase “there are no bailouts in capitalism” just as “there is no crying in baseball.” If you have taken college-level courses in capitalism, nowhere will you find governmental bailouts as a structural part of capitalism. These sweet deals are brokered by rich people with the people who serve them to protect their wealth.

It was argued that “we couldn’t let such-and-such a bank or insurance company fail.” Wha? Failures is what capitalists brag about. It is what keeps them sharp. It is the leading edge of “competition.” Without failure, just what is capitalism? All of those people should have failed and learned from the experience . . . or not. So, what did they learn instead? A sucker is born every minute?

So, when you hear anti-socialist rhetoric realize that it is from the wealthy, or paid for by the wealthy, to protect the good deal they have going, nothing more and nothing less. And this is actually rebounding upon the rich. Younger Americans hear the anti-socialism rhetoric and they think “Ah, this is what we need to counter those greedy ass hats.” The young are embracing socialism more and more as the rhetoric against it is ramped up. And the harder the rich squeeze the poor and middle class, the more these younger Americans are embracing some form of democratic socialism.

They also aren’t stupid. They see countries like Sweden which are capitalist, just not capitalist as we are. They have a form of democratic socialism, in which the inherent negatives associated with capitalism are suppressed. The government acts on behalf of the people and offers basic services that seem to be the norm in civilized countries. They recognize, as do all thinking people except captured economists and bought politicians, that capitalism is self-destructive unless it is controlled significantly. In this country, the wealthy have turned phrases such as “government regulation” and “unearned income” into either non-terms or epithets. Why would they want there to be no controls on capitalism? Because in this country, when things go well, they profit enormously, and when the crashes inevitably happen, their paid-for politicians step in and the “public” bails them out. This heads I win, tails you lose system benefits only the wealthy, so their support of it is no surprise. The actual surprise is the support existing in the general population for this robber baron mentality.

They Are All For Competition … Until

The conservatives in this country are all for market-based solutions and competition under a capitalistic regime … until … until it hurts their bottom line.

The “party line” is that competition is good because better businesses succeed and poorer business fail, thus improving the overall quality of business. (I wonder if Trump’s evangelical Christian base understands how Darwinian capitalism is? Hmm.) But when it comes to businesses some of the elite have stock in or receive “campaign contributions” from (Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean?), then it is all hands on deck to preserve the privileges of that business, or the business itself.

The coal industry has been in decline for a very long time. In the early 1900’s almost a million people had jobs mining coal. By the early 2000’s that was down to around 75,000 and recently some say down to closer to 55,000. In those early days the reductions in the numbers of jobs was due to mechanization. Coal didn’t need as many men wielding picks and shovels when they got steam power, then electrical power to their mines. More recently, the demand for coal has dropped. Its primary use has always been as a fuel to create motive power, e.g. steam railroad engines, or stationary power, e.g. electrical generation. Recently, the POTUS unveiled a plan to lower the regulations of coal mining to unleash the sleeping giant. At the same time, a Southwestern energy company decided to do through with their plans to mothball three coal-fired electricity generating plants. The reason? There was a bit of a glut in capacity, electricity being cheaper to produce in plants using natural gas as a fuel. Coal is being displaced by … wait for it … wait for it … another fossil fuel. (Oh the irony! Har de har har …)

Even if it could withstand the challenge of cheaper natural gas, renewables like solar and wind are waiting in the wings to deliver a knock out blow. The only coal being mined in the future will be to make chemical feedstocks (chemicals used to make other chemicals). Burning it to make energy (and CO₂ that is causing Climate Change) will no longer be part of the picture. In addition as “smart grids” become implement to distribute electricity, the huge amount of electricity being lost/wasted will become available for use, and …

Dude, the coal party is over. But archbusinessman and President of the United States, Donald Trump, still things coal is being killed by excess governmental regulation. Donald Trump is also dumb as a post. This is capitalism baby, you are supposed to be fer it, not agin’ it. (Somebody please tell Trump.)

And, I cannot stop by this topic without noting that some of the store-bought politicians are claiming that solar power and wind power are only succeeding because of government tax breaks and purchaser tax credits … and they say this with a straight face! These are the same elites that made sure that the coal and oil industries got healthy protections from foreign competition and … wait for it … direct government subsidies. The oil subsidy (the tap is still open) is a century old and costs tax payers $8 billion dollars per year. Will someone tell those pols that the idea was to protect the industry in its infancy, not through to the old age home.

I wonder if the coal industry will continue to get their subsidies after they close their businesses. After all, the bribes they pay the politicians for continuing to vote them in have to come from somewhere.

GOP Plans to Repeal Dodd-Frank Legislation

Why do we need legislation that prevents big banks from undermining the whole world’s economy with overly risky investments? We can trust them. They are our friends.

Granted the Dodd-Frank legislation didn’t go nearly far enough (millions of dollars per day were spent lobbying against the law in the first place and then against its implementation after it was passed). The Glass-Steagall law should have been re-enacted verbatim, plus a whole lot more, but “burdensome regulation” is undermining progress in this country (whine, whine, sniff). This is why the big banks circumvented the existing regulations, corrupted regulators, and invented unregulated shadow banking in the first place.

We will only be free when big banks can wreak havoc as much as they desire … and, of course, our government bails them out every 6-8 years when it all crashes into ruin. Heck, the last time only cost us $2,000,000,000,000 (yes, that is two trillion dollars) plus several trillion more in lost property values, but that only affected ordinary citizens (they got no bailout, don’t you know).

At this point, I am starting to root for the GOP’s bad ideas. The party has so desperately wanted to do all of these things for years! And they are going to own the repercussions of each and every one of them.

Deregulation and Trust

As I have commented on before, an article in JAMA Internal Medicine reported that in the 1960s, the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists to publish a study blaming fat and cholesterol for coronary heart disease while largely exculpating sugar. This study, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, helped set the agenda for decades of public health policy designed to steer Americans into low-fat foods, which increased carbohydrate consumption and exacerbated our obesity epidemic.

And, as I have done often enough, I will take a step back and look at this in context.

Part of the Republican agenda is that excessive government regulation is strangling American business and if those regulations were done away with, the power of American ingenuity would be unleashed.

Well, once again we see in the behavior of the sugar industry what they would do if government regulations were dispensed with. We have seen this from Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, the tobacco industry (they are alive and well selling to unregulated foreign markets), the banking industry, the financial sector, etc. They are adept at manipulating the regulations in the first place (Is Dodd-Franck done yet?) and once those are in place they are adept at manipulating the regulators.

Can you imagine what their behavior would be like in the absence of regulations? I think it is safe to say we can “trust” them to be who they are.

One has to wonder that Republicans are even willing to share their deregulation goal with voters; it seems to confirm their depravity.

Why the Inequality?

Well, bubbie, it wasn’t by accident!

From How ‘Competitiveness’ Became One of the Great Unquestioned Virtues of Contemporary Culture by William Davies, a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London (Posted on July 30, 2016 by Yves Smith)

“I suggest that we need to understand how competition, competitiveness and, ultimately, inequality are rendered justifiable and acceptable – otherwise their sustained presence in public and private life appears simply inexplicable.

“And yet, this approach also helps us to understand what exactly has broken down over recent years, which I would argue is the following: At a key moment in the history of neoliberal thought, its advocates shifted from defending markets as competitive arenas amongst many, to viewing society-as-a-whole as one big competitive arena. Under the latter model, there is no distinction between arenas of politics, economics and society. To convert money into political power, or into legal muscle, or into media influence, or into educational advantage, is justifiable, within this more brutal, capitalist model of neoliberalism. The problem that we now know as the ‘1%’ is, as has been argued of America recently, a problem of oligarchy.

“Underlying it is the problem that there are no longer any external, separate or higher principles to appeal to, through which oligarchs might be challenged. Legitimate powers need other powers through which their legitimacy can be tested; this is the basic principle on which the separation of executive, legislature and judiciary is based. The same thing holds true with respect to economic power, but this is what has been lost.

“Regulators, accountants, tax collectors, lawyers, public institutions, have been drawn into the economic contest, and become available to buy. To use the sort of sporting metaphor much-loved by business leaders; it’s as if the top football team has bought not only the best coaches, physios and facilities, but also bought the referee and the journalists as well. The bodies responsible for judging economic competition have lost all authority, which leaves the dream of ‘meritocracy’ or a ‘level playing field’ (crucial ideals within the neoliberal imaginary) in tatters. Politically speaking, this is as much a failure of legitimation as it is a problem of spiralling material inequality.

“The result is a condition that I term ‘contingent neoliberalism’, contingent in the sense that it no longer operates with any spirit of fairness or inclusiveness. The priority is simply to prop it up at all costs. If people are irrational, then nudge them. If banks don’t lend money, then inflate their balance sheets through artificial means. If a currency is no longer taken seriously, political leaders must repeatedly guarantee it as a sovereign priority. If people protest, buy a water canon. This is a system whose own conditions are constantly falling apart, and which governments must do constant repair work on.”

Why Are Bankers Rich?

The title should probably be “why do we expect banker’s to be rich?” but brevity is something I am working on.

When I was a youngin’ my communities bankers were, well, prominent people. Financially, they were well-to-do, we would say. Were they rich? No, nobody thought that. You see, community bankers are technicians: they work the levers of systems designed by other people. They were paid well, because they had the opportunity to steal a great deal of money, so getting a really well paying job was a disincentive to robbing the bank through embezzlement. Then the banks figured out how to include computerized checks and barriers to prevent such things, they ceased to have marble edifices and brass accoutrements and older people in charge (I do not recall seeing a young banker as a youth, they were all old men, conveying a sense of stability and gravitas.) and then banks and savings and loan institutions all of a sudden had much younger people in charge, of course on much smaller salaries. But then we got our “banks” putting up Halloween decorations and the like, much more festive.

So, today community bankers aren’t expected to be rich … they are just technicians.

But investment bankers, now they were expected to be rich. When I was young, an investment banker invested funds from a pool they collected and to make sure they didn’t embezzle money, they had to make a sizeable contribution to the investment pool. They were gambling their own money as well as their partners and interested investors. This was a rich person’s game. And if an investment banker wasn’t rich or getting rich they were a walking billboard screaming “Failure!” because the lucrative investments they were supposed to be making were not all that good, apparently.

There were just a few investment bankers, ever since the great Depression made sure that the funds in community banks were not to be mingled with the funds in investment banks (hint: the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933). Well, a gift from Bill Clinton and the other neoconservatives in the Democratic Party (we starting to agree with the arch conservatives who call the party the Democrat Party, because it doesn’t seem very democratic) was the repeal of Glass-Steagall because, well, according to the then economic geniuses, we were all grown up and didn’t need the training wheels anymore. (Why is it that economists have a track record that makes weathermen look as accurate as sharpshooters and we pay any attention to them at all?)

Just about a decade after the repeal of Glass-Steagall, we got the Great Recession, courtesy of that repeal. And the perpetrators of the Two Trillion Dollar Debacle got away scot free (shush, politically correct people, the term has nothing to do with Scots or Scotland; look it up)! Not a one went to jail. In the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s, 3,000+ bankers were prosecuted and 10% went to jail. This time, not a one because, you see, bankers are supposed to be rich.

Rich bankers make political contributions and we can’t afford to offend them, because, well, they are rich.

Like the Black man in Dallas who decided it was time to even the score with the police (deplorable, yet understandable), I wonder when it is that people are going to decide there are too many rich bankers and it is time to cull the herd.

The U.S. is Replacing Free Speech with “Free Speech”

The whole concept of free speech has undergone a tremendous amount of change since the drafting of the U.S. Constitution. To the Framers of the Constitution, including Benjamin Franklin who was a printer, remember, the idea of free speech was to protect political speech … by politicians. England had a long history of members of Parliament being harassed or killed by the monarch of the time based upon what they said in the halls of government. This was addressed in due time by the concept of free speech … applied only to politicians. The concept of free speech was designed to protect politicians from such abuse and wasn’t considered applicable to ordinary folks, especially not to newspapers. (The newspapers of revolutionary times would be referred to now as “tabloids” or “scandal sheets,” since they were.)

England still has a set of libel laws that would make us blanch, over the pond. If convicted of libel, you can find out the actual cost of your words. Our libel laws are not so draconian, but we have expanded the right of free speech to include ordinary speakers. This, I think is a qualified “good thing.”

Currently, our news media have become corporate and governmental mouthpieces. The Fox Network, exists only to support a political ideology and has no commitment to the truth in anything. Most of the rest of the news organs in this country have been taken over by corporations seeking profits. Gone are the days in which TV Networks supported independent news rooms, with no need of a profit being made, because the networks had “Jack Benny to make money.” Now, a news show that doesn’t make money is scrapped in short order. So, the goal of such programs is #1 to make money. All of the idealistic-sounding goals like: support the republic, contribute to society, etc. are way down the list. (This all began in earnest, by the way, when Ronald Reagan shitcanned the “Fairness Doctrine.”)

So, now an aphorism I was taught comes into play. That is “in the absence of good communication, people will make things up and it is always negative.”

Enter the Blogosphere and its minions, the Twitterverse, and whatever the fuck Facebook is … Narcissismland?). Yes, I am aware that this blog is part of the chatter. The problem is: if one looks at the chatter, how much of it is worthless to the support of our society and culture? If you aren’t convinced that only a tiny fraction of the blah, blah, blah is serious commentary, go onto YouTube and do a search for “Cat Videos.” Without cat videos YouTube would be less than half its current size.

Free speech in this country has become mindless chatter. Our politicians never say anything of substance (if they do it is labeled a “gaffe”). So, the role free speech plays in maintaining our country has dropped to almost zero.

There are two ways you can control information: provide nothing but silence, a la Soviet Russia, or you can, as the saying goes, “if you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” Since we are already up to our hips in 24-hour news cycle bullshit, I thought by now the smell would have given away its presence, but apparently not.

Drowning in Economic Bullstuff

“I got out and they sucked me right back in.”
SPR

In an editorial in the NY Times (Don’t Break Up the Banks. They’re Not the Problem.) Steve Eisman, one of the real folks portrayed in the movie “The Big Short,” argues that we should not want to break up the big banks, because well, it is messy, and it would hurt economic growth, and well, just because.

“If we want a stronger economy, improving the distribution and growth of personal income should be our focus. Breaking up the big banks will not help, and might even hurt.”

These people are incredible.

The whole point in making the banks as big as the are, including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act, was to continue the shift of the stock and other markets away from their original intent and toward speculative investments, none of which benefits the country or ordinary citizens. The stock market has become the tool of speculators and little else.

When you were in school, I am sure, you were taught the party line about the stock market, that a company, could sell itself by issuing stock certificates to a large number of people (thereafter the company is “owned” by whoever owns 51% of the stock). The money generated by this sale of stock allows the company to invest in its own growth as a “public corporation.” The company then paid “interest” to those who bought the stock (dividends) and maybe, down the road, the stock could be sold for a profit. It is a nice fairy tale and it is true as far as it goes. But all you need do is examine the most recent “star” initial public offerings (IPOs) to see something strange. Take Facebook’s IPO, for example. Facebook doesn’t make anything and I doubt anybody in your circle of acquaintances could explain how it makes money, but its stock price soared like an eagle then went down and back up. People were literally panting to buy stock in this company, a tech company that probably will not be around in 10 years , certainly not in 20 years. The example we were given in school was local widget factories, factories that employed our parents.

As far as breaking up the big banks “hurting the economy” because it would “disrupt all of the loans they were making,” consider the bank bailouts of 2008 and 2009. The federal government made the mistake of not tying the bailouts to the “loans” they could be making, so what did the banks do? They looked around and said, “there is no growth” so there is no reason to loan and they bought stocks and bonds with the money. Figure it out! If someone lends you money at 0% interest and you can invest it in the stock market at 5-6% or even higher. Talk about free money. All of that investment in the stock market made stock prices soar (the “markets” recovered from the Great Depression first, remember?) which made those banks investments even more valuable, made them even more money … that they still did not make loans with. The whole idea of them making loans with “free money” was to stimulate the economy by companies taking a chance to expand while it was cheap. People would be hired, goods bought, by these expanding companies and soon the recovery would be well under way. “Oh, wait, look! A shiny new stock certificate, I think I’ll buy that instead of making a loan with the money,” was the bank’s response.

The reason to break up the banks is because they are scum-sucking pigs, that when given the opportunity to make loans for free to help the economy recover from the largest economic depression in almost a century, they decided to profit from our loss. Then they spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying against any change in the rules that allowed them to speculate unhindered by effective regulation/regulators which created the GD in the first place.

Gee, it is complicated! Gosh, oh, what can we do? All we need do for now is separate federally insured bank accounts from speculative ones and let them figure it out. They are, after all, the “new” smartest guys in the room.

Cognitive Dissonance? Nope. Nothing to See Here, Move Along

The GOP insists upon a number of principles that are completely contradictory to reality for anyone to be a true believer. A the top, you must believe in the supremacy of free markets, that all government regulation of such is bad. This, of course, flies in the face of a steady stream of corporate bad/illegal/destructive/careless behavior. Think about Enron, the subprime mortgage disaster, the price of gasoline going up while demand was going down due to speculators, Monsanto, the Koch brothers trying to eliminate government support for alternative energy in Kansas, the Wall Street banks gambling with other people’s money and cheating their own customers, the fracking companies (What earthquakes? Water doesn’t burn. We don’t contaminate your water, no. All we want are laws that send people to prison for describing what we are doing.), railroad tank car fleet operators (What explosions? Our cars are perfectly safe.), General Motors (That’s not a defective ignition switch, you must have bumped the keys with your knee. Problems, there are no problems.), . . . , I forgot about the nuclear fuel company that buried its waste “out back” instead of processing it according to the law. (Okay I am done, wait, …)

So, if the free market would correct all of these things, why did they happen in the first place? Did government regulations cause all of these things? Was it too expensive to do things the right way, so they took forced shortcuts, knowing their parent corporation could “disincorporate” if things got really bad?

“The free market ideology is actually just an economic manifestation of human greed.”

Free markets are driven by greed, no matter their original attentions. Manipulation of “free” markets is the quickest path to wealth and so attracts greedy people. (Free markets are by nature based upon all parties having perfect information, free from anything manipulative, like advertising.) What aspect of free markets protects us from those greedy people? There is nothing.

Government taxes upon corporations are a way of charging those corporations for their externality costs (their use of the roads, communication networks, etc., their pollution of the air and water and land, and other things we share) but those same corporations have bribed government officials to eliminate or reduce their corporate taxes to a bare minimum, leaving their externalities to be paid for by others (us). They also make sure all of the laws benefit them and not the general citizenry. As just one example, college students cannot expunge college loan debts (to corporations) through bankruptcy, but corporations can avoid a massive toxic waste cleanup that way.

So, what is it about free markets that will “correct” for these corporate failings and manifestations of greed?

The answer is short—nothing. The free market ideology is actually just an economic manifestation of human greed. “Leave us alone to make as much money as we can and maybe you will benefit sometime down the road. Don’t interfere. Ignore that man behind the curtain.”

Is it just a coincidence that anytime we get close to their ideology that the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer accelerate? I don’t think so.

Since these zealots claim that anything that smacks of regulation of free markets is socialism, well, then I am in favor of socialism, at least in so far as it is practiced in Scandinavia. There the reins on human greed, er, free markets, are held tightly by public interests.